That's a cracker of a video. Ah, those old time TV production techniques...

It makes me even more appreciative of the choice of free (as in beer) software we have these days. It was a feeding frenzy back then! Fortunately many earlier personal computers came with an integrated word processor, the cost of which was incorporated into the price of the computer. One of my first computers was an Amstrad PCW 8512 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amstrad_PCW) which came with a word processor called Locoscript.

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have you see the spell checker in that video?? awesomely slow. maybe they programmed WordStar in Java

I didn't get that far to be honest. However if you look at the very low specs of computers around that time (the first IBM PC, for example, had 16/64 KiB of RAM and ran an Intel 8088 @ 4.77 MHz), it was amazing they could do what they did - the programming was impressively efficient. You just learned to be patient...

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I have a box of around 200 disks, mostly compilers and utilities but also some applications. Alas, I doubt if I have anything that could read them now and I can no longer find CPM/86 in any form.

Worth a shot?

https://virtuallyfun.superglobalmega...0/06/14/cpm86/

Also: https://superuser.com/questions/5168...-m-under-linux

I remember in the early '80s, word processors ran in the terminal. (The first one I used was DisplayWrite 3.)

A recent issue of Linux Magazine mentioned WordGrinder, a currently-maintained command line word processor. https://cowlark.com/wordgrinder/

I have used it yet, because I don't process the volume of words I used to, but OP might find it interesting.

Before the PC came along, my father-in-law spent more than $10,000 for an IBM DisplayWriter, with its two 8-1/2" floppy disks and a daisy-wheel printer.

I owned a Franklin ACE 1000 computer, which was an Apple-II clone that had a CP/M card ... and the best keyboard I have ever seen in any computer. (It was an IBM Selectric® typewriter keyboard.) 64KB of RAM. My mother wrote her Master's thesis on it, praising it endlessly for the fact that she didn't have to pay money to "typists." It ran WordStar. Its designer said that he wanted to create "the world's best WordStar machine," and he probably did.

Very helpful! Now if I can only find a 5.25" floppy drive that is quad density....

WordPerfect couldn't hold a candle to WordStar, IMHO.

And, "these kids today" must realize, this was the state of microelectronics development at that point in time. Intel Corporation could not manufacture the very-dense therefore very-complex and very-fast semiconductors that they can routinely produce today. The "slow, old" machines that we speak of were the best that then could be had, and they were all light-years better than a typewriter. Software and hardware designers worked just as hard as they do today, to wrest as much functionality out of what the engineers had given them as they possibly could.

Today, as we enjoy "gigabytes at gigaHertz" in our shirt pockets, we might foolishly giggle at what used to be. However, "Moore's Law" has not yet stopped coming true. One day, we and our computers will laugh at these "primitive old days." You know, back when computers still needed to be programmed ...

I never dreamed that I would see as much advancement as I have seen, in my entire lifetime. My six-year old self's fascination with "making a machine do something" has turned into one helluva fun ride that isn't over yet.

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So true. Watching the TV series "Halt And Catch Fire" brought back alot of memories of those times ... Excellent show, by the way.

Cheers :-)

Programmes for terminal use are never enough! DisplayWrite does look nice for that time.
Word Perfect for DOS, later, was a big step ahead.

I disagree. Programs for terminal are often exactly enough. But both stands on this subject are opinions based upon experience and "enough" is not, by itself, a well defined standard.

For some information about Wordstar one might examine this page [url]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordStar[/url.

Linux distributions, to my knowledge, do not support WordStar. They cannot, as it is not open source software.
There are clones that ARE OSS, but they are supported by their specific and individual teams.
For closing dates on each software one would have to address the specific team or company that specific product.

Me too...Kaypro luggable with two 5.5" floppy drives...no HDD.
I often describe nano/pico as "wordstar like" -- but of course it doesn't do the embedded text formatting.

Did anyone use Lotus Manuscript? This was a great DOS based word processor circa 1986 for writing technical papers. The background screen was red, with white foreground characters. It came with a template that you placed over the right side of the keyboard. It came with a built-in spell checker at no extra cost. It supported special characters like Umlaut, Cedilla, accents, etc, long before other software. It also had support for equations long before WordPerfect. There was one odd quirk. When you needed to print a document that contained special characters to a PostScript printer, you had to edit the PostScript file and insert a header that contained PostScript font re-encode info. This was a real PITA. Then to print, you had to copy the modified file to LPT1, depending on where the printer was attached. I don't recall if this also applied to PCL printers.

Unfortunately, Lotus orphaned the product at version 2 and began supporting Ami Pro instead. Ami Pro had a nasty equation bug that was never fixed.

Manuscript was arguably the best word processor for engineers and scientists. Here is a nostalgic article about Manuscript.

Shortly after Ami Pro was orphaned, I switched to LaTeX with Emacs as a front end.

If the OP is looking for software that works on older hardware, Emacs and LaTeX will work fine.